MIDDLE PERSIAN INSCRIPTIONS

Abstract

The small quantity of epigraphic material hitherto recovered in Pahlavi, that is, Sasanian Middle Persian, could easily be accommodated in a single publication. But none such as yet exists, the material still being either unpublished or published inadequately. Unquestionably the most important part of it is represented by the monumental inscriptions of the 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries, with the addition of a small number of later inscriptions executed in a script known as cursive, some ostraca and papyri, and some important collections of seals, inscribed stones, and “bullae” or seal impressions on clay. Few as they are, these documents constitute a remarkable inheritance; they represent the only strictly Iranian source of Sasanian history, inasmuch as the Graeco-Latin, Armenian or Syriac historical literature is foreign in origin, while the Arab-Persian authors, although they provided useful evidence by drawing on Sasanian writings of which nothing has survived, were much later in date than the events which they record; their perspective may have been open to question and their memory fallible. Thus there is good reason for regarding the Sasanian inscriptions as a cultural heritage of first importance. Moreover they are of especial interest on the linguistic level, for they provide the earliest examples of Sasanian Middle Persian, which otherwise, apart from the Manichaean documents of Turfān, occurs in quantity only in Mazdaean works, which gradually came to be written in a scholarly language at the last stage of its development, into which neologisms and persianisms were intruding.

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